Sneak Peek: Word Crank 1.3 Upcoming Release

Our upcoming release of Word Crank has a slick new home screen and logo.  It also includes the new Game Feed from OpenFeint which allows users to stay up-to-date with what other Word Crank players are doing in the game!

Check out the images below:

[gallery]

 

This Week @Sivart Tech: November 18, 2011

So this week we have been busy working on our December release of Word Crank.  This release will include some exciting new features.

First, we are implementing the Game Feed feature that is new to OpenFeint, which will allow users to find out more about what the other users of the game are doing.  This will include changing their profile pictures to conquering one of the many levels.  We hope that this will be a fun way to become more engaged with our game.

Next, we have several graphics changes that we hope will give the game more appeal and make it more polished.  And with any new build that we work on, performance improvements and bug fixes are the standard.

Also we are excited that our Android downloads are continuing at a steady rate, adding more than 1,000 new downloads over the past week!

October with HOT 99.5: How did we do?

During the month of October we ran a multifaceted campaign with HOT 99.5, a local Washington, DC radio station.  So how did we do?  Here are some of the statistics.

AdMob Revenue

During September we made ~$11 from the AdMob ads that run in the free version of our game.  For the month of October we made about ~$16, so we made about 5 more bucks.  Impressive?  Not really to us...

Word Crank Page Views

Our Word Crank page was another key aspect of our campaign, as it was the URL that we chose for the "Text Back" feature of our campaign.  We went from 28 views in September to 203 views in October.  That was over 7 times the traffic!  For us that was a huge win as it exposed people to our brand and hopefully helped us to get a few downloads and followers of the blog.

Number of People Playing

The October Google Analytics data is shown in the following graphic.  When the numbers were compared against our September data we saw a 25% increase in visits.  We are going to go ahead and give the HOT 99.5 campaign credit for that as well.

Reputation

Our reputation has been the clear winner for us.  Doing this campaign has increased our visibility and really given us tons of credibility with our friends and co-workers. Improved reputation can be a very strategic tool for any small company.  Before doing the campaign our friends and family were our biggest fans, but once they heard the commercials on the radio they began to create more buzz and do even more word-of-mouth marketing for us.  Read my post here about why word-of-mouth marketing is so powerful.

Overall, we are happy with the results.  We would have loved to get a bit more "bang for our buck", but we can always do it again.  Final words of advice to others who may be starting out and considering marketing opportunities, radio is not the best place to start out.  We were able to see comparable gains advertising via AdMob.

A Word Game That Does Not Try to Save the World

So what makes our products unique?  One of the rules of marketing is to know your product and be prepared with an elevator speech.  You know, a 30 second pitch prepared, the time of a typical elevator ride about your product and what sets it apart from all others.

So here goes:

Introspectively speaking, due to experiences in life unique solely to us, our acuity is shaped causing anything we create to be different from anyone else.  And blah…blah…blah…

So now that we’ve cleared the air and have identified on a cosmic scale what makes our product unique, looking on a more rudimentary scale, what motivated the creation of Word Crank?  Put simply, a desire to find a word game that we would actually play.

We’re not intimating that there weren’t any good word games out there, because there are.  We were simply looking for a game that combined elements of Word and Arcade style gaming that we both would be interested in.

You see although being siblings, we have two different backgrounds and stakes in our product.  Here comes the very exciting history lesson: 

Our CTO is a computer programmer by profession, and has single-handedly coded all of our projects. Her objective when creating a game centers on playability and usability.  The code has to work and memory allocation is central around enhancing the user’s experience.

The CEO’s experience with coding begins and ends with formulas for excel worksheets.  With a background in business and an avid “gamer”, for him it just has to pop and be fun.  “No chipped paint” as Walt Disney articulated around his reason for creating Disneyland.  It just has to look good!

Combine these and you get Word Crank our very first release.  A word game that’s not buggy, has a very expansive dictionary and does what it’s supposed to do (in our developer voice).  But then it does something else.  It creates an atmosphere with a beautiful UI (User Interface).  A word game with elements of grunge, hip hop, pop, and action!  (Guess whose voice added this)

You see, both voices played a major role in the creation of Word Crank.  We combined programming principles which allow our game to play smoothly and feel effortless.  We also brought arcade to our game by not just allowing you to make the word C-A-T and get 50 points, YAY *sarcastically* but we brought engaging music, cool animations, and some serious themes.

We thank all of our 5k+ downloads on the Android market and are excited that overall reception has been positive with only 6 users rating below 4 stars (send us a message on what you’d like to see to change that to a 4/5) We’re going to keep making cool apps that people like and promise to never take ourselves too seriously but remember it’s just a Word game that doesn’t try to save the world.

We're Taking Over!!!

Just wanted to do this quick post to brag about our "HOT 99.5 Home Page Take Over."  Check out HOT 99.5 to see how Word Crank has officially taken over!



 

A.A.R.F.!! Another Amazing Review Finished!!

Sorry for the dog bark but we @ Sivart Technology are so excited that another review for Word Crank has been done.  Check out the YouTube video done by macrover180:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6KcGrzcPXI

Such an awesome Camera btw!!  A complete facelift of Word Crank is coming to try to keep up with it's siblings on the way (3 more games in the works!!)

Facebook F8 Conference: What it can mean for your Mobile App

The Facebook F8 Conference  promises to unveil exciting new features to allow users to engage with content.  One thing that is already noticeable is the new look of users' Facebook NewsFeed.  Even though this new feature has its fair share of critics, I feel that Facebook is positioning itself to take an even larger role in people's lives.  So how does this effect developers of Mobile Apps?

Well one major thing that I can foresee is that Mobile Game Developers may want to strongly consider moving their games to the Facebook App Platform.  Even without taking full advantage of all of the social features that the Graph API has available, several games could be quite successful.  Some simple Googling can provide several short tutorials to get one started in creating their very own Facebook App.  That's just my two cents for today.

Mobile Game Marketing: The Power of Word-of-Mouth

When marketing your mobile game don't underestimate the power of Word-of-Mouth Marketing.  Well, what is Word-of-Mouth Marketing?  It has been described this way by the Word Of Mouth Marketing Association:

"The act of consumers providing information to other consumers...It is the art and science of building active, mutually beneficial consumer-to-consumer and consumer-to-marketer communications."

What can that mean for you and your business?  Well, basically you need to make a great product and provide tools to make it easier for your customers to share how wonderful your game/application is with others.  You may think that this form of marketing is free, but that is not necessarily the case.  You need to provide infrastructure that makes this type of consumer-to-consumer marketing successful and it does require lots of time to keep up with the different front-facing tools that you choose to implement.

In marketing our first game, Word Crank, we have used the following tools to facilitate the Word-of-Mouth process.

Tools

• Facebook Fan Page


• Twitter Account


• Blog with sharing abilities


• YouTube Channel


• Reddit Account


• OpenFeint integration in the game


• Email

Making use of these various tools takes time, as you have to constantly make posts and send updates.  But more importantly you allow your customers the opportunity to provide feedback and then easily share the information that they have received with others.  So far we are happy with this area of our Marketing endeavors.  However, it's challenging to say for sure quantitatively what the impact has been up to this point.

SOLUTION: Apple Mach-O Linker Error When Compiling iPhone App

Recently encountered the following error when compiling an iPhone Application, "Apple Mach-O Linker Error".  After some digging I realized that I had included the same file twice in the application.  After removing the duplicate file the error went away.  Hope this helps someone else that has a similar error.

Read more about iPhone Development

Download Word Crank on Android for FREE!

Our Game Marketing Post featured on Trove.com

Recently one of our posts was featured on Trove.com.  For those of you who don't know yet, Trove is an up and coming News Aggregator that incorporates Social Media throughout.  We were proud to have our article featured under the "Facebook Advertising" topic.

Word Crank now Available on iPhone!

Just got the thumbs up from Apple, so go and check it out all you iPhone users! Word Crank on iPhone

Advertising your Mobile Game's Fan Page with Facebook

So recently we have decided to advertise our Word Crank Fan Page using the Facebook Ads capability.  Taking advantage of social media to promote your Android or iOS application is becoming the standard among the majority of game developers today. Almost all of the top hundred apps have a Facebook presence, so we of course jumped on the bandwagon to help promote our game.

The Facebook Ads infrastructure allows you to target certain demographics for your ad campaign.  What's unique about advertising with Facebook is that you have the ability to target potential users via their interests and likes.  Not with that being said we initially targeted users who liked things such as, "music", "gaming", "reading", etc.  We believed that these users would be more likely to become fans of Word Crank.  However, we saw very low click-through-rates for those users.  The next stop was to just target anyone, regardless of their interests and the clicks started coming through.  Below are the results for the past few days with the new adjustment in targeting.



We were able to get 14 new "likes" out of the 34 people who actually clicked the ad.  Before this we only had 1 new "like" from the Facebook Ad Campaign.  We are happy with the results, and since this is a new game we will have to give it some time to see what impact the Facebook Fan Page is going to have on our marketing efforts.  One downside of the Facebook generated ad however,  is that you don't have a lot of flexibility in the layout and colors.  They use a standard template for all of the ads, so you have to be creative with the picture you choose and its accompanying wording.  I hope that soon Facebook will allow for more layout options.

Please feel free to ask questions/comment.  Thanks.

Working with Texture Packer

In my post about some simple iOS and Android programming tips I mentioned a software called Texture Packer that is very useful in creating Sprite Sheets.  Below are the steps that can be used to create a simple Sprite Sheet which are the steps that I used in creating Word Crank.

Instructions

1. Open Texture Packer.  You will be presented with a blank view where you can add your Sprites.


2. Click on the 'Add Sprites' button to select the Sprites that you want to include in your Sprite Sheet.


3. Once you have selected your Sprites, just click the 'Publish' button and you can will have two files, the .png file which is your Sprite Sheet and a .plist file which can be used to identify where each object is located in the Sprite Sheet.

Screen Shots

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our first YouTube review!

We just had Word Crank reviewed on YouTube!
This is an excellent review which discusses how addictive the game truly is.

Check it out:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyBu7B9qFo8

Re: Most Android Apps Aren’t Being Used — and You Can Blame Google

Interesting article about the state of Android Apps: Most Android Apps Aren’t Being Used — and You Can Blame Google.

Tips: Programming for Android and iOS

As I continue my foray into game development on the iOS and Android platforms I wanted to take a few moments to share some tips that I have found to be very useful in creating an application that can will eventually run on both platforms.

Tips

General

1. Separate the game logic from the user interface layer.  This will make it easier to port the code over to the accompanying platform.  For example, if you put the main game loop logic in a separate Java class, then you basically can just do a line by line conversion to Objective-C when you port it to iOS.


2. Place all Strings in one location.  Have a Constants.java where you put all of your static String objects, then when you port to iOS you just use the same thing, except now it is Constants.h.


3. If you are going to use Texture Atlases in your game, create them using a tool such as Texture Packer and then you will have the exact location of each Sprite stored in a file that can be easily referenced for both versions of the game.

iOS

Use a framework! Working with Cocos2d made the transition relatively smooth as we converted Word Crank from its Android version to iOS.

Android

Get a good book, I read Beginning Android Games, it helped lay a good foundation for working with Android and understanding the various states of a running application and the GLSurfaceView that serves as the main background for all OpenGL drawings.

Any questions? Just leave a comment. Thanks.

Take a chance on Android

Have you created an Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, or Cut the Rope game?  If so let me start by saying congratulations and may I borrow $20?   

For any other indie developer looking to break into the ever-growing mobile application market understand that competition is fierce, in particular on the iPhone.  With developers spending in some cases an estimated 100,000k + dollars (Angry Birds) it is very difficult to keep up with development companies when your typical indie developer is on a shoestring budget.  So what’s the antsy aggravated atypical developer to do?

Here comes the Android operating system with its open source indie roots.  Android has taken fire by critics for the “lack of quality apps” as well as the difficulty in making money with paid apps.  This leaves some developers scurrying to IOS with its safer
yet overcrowded marketplace.  I suppose the glass can be seen as half empty or half full?

For the developer looking to gain experience that has a vision they would love to share with the world, Android may be the best platform to use.  The market is growing exponentially and figures show that the sales of android devices have outpaced that of the iPhone.  As more developers create projects for the Android market, the quality of the app store is sure to increase as well.

Why not take the less beaten path and try your hand on the android market?  Depending on the type of app that you’re developing, the free model which lends itself to the android market may bring you more success.

Application Crash Reporting -- Android Style

In order to provide users with an error-free as possible application, it's imperative that you use some form of Crash Reporting. The ACRA library which is available on Android provides such a framework. Here is how they describe their tool:

"ACRA is a library enabling Android Application to automatically post their crash reports to a GoogleDoc  form. It is targeted to android applications developers to help them get data from their applications when they crash or behave erroneously."

We have integrated the ACRA library into our application, Word Crank, so far I have been able to fix 3 major bugs that did not turn up in testing, but were clearly called out in the Google Doc created by the ACRA tool. We chose to go with the most basic functionality that of sending a Crash Report every time the application Force Closes. However, it is very configurable and can display status messages, custom Android Toasts, etc.

I highly recommend this tool for anyone developing an Android Application. You can download it here: ACRA Crash Reporting Tool

Adding Touch Events to a Custom Cocos2d Sprite

In creating our game Word Crank, we decided that we would make the clickable block objects handle the touch events themselves instead of using the CCScene object. In order to do that we had to implement the CCTargetedTouchDelegate.  A sample of the code can be found below:

Inside the Header File:

[sourcecode language="objc"]
@interface CustomSprite : CCSprite <CCTargetedTouchDelegate>
[/sourcecode]

Inside the Implementation File:

[sourcecode language="objc"]

- (void) onEnterTransitionDidFinish
{
[[CCTouchDispatcher sharedDispatcher] addTargetedDelegate:self priority:1 swallowsTouches:YES];
}

- (void) onExit
{
[[CCTouchDispatcher sharedDispatcher] removeDelegate:self];
}
[/sourcecode]

Should My App Be Free? The reason we say YES! – sort of…

Months of hard work, countless hours plugging away at code, 150 cups of coffee and finally your app is finished! Now comes the question of whether to make the app free, paid, or both. Sidebar: A lot of the decision will be based on the type of application. The free model is not always apposite. Consider “exempli gratia” the ticket price of your app. If your app is a high-ticket item, ad revenues may not recover the loss of sales from a paid version. In this case a trial version of your app or an in-app purchase to unlock all features may be more appropriate.

After weighing the cost, if you do decide to go with a free version have no fear! There is still opportunity to make money. Paid vs. Free in some ways can be compared to selling a house or renting it out. If you sell (paid) a house, you can receive a large sum of money at once, however by renting (free); you are able to generate steady income over a protracted time period.

Ads can generate a substantial amount of revenue if you have enough active installs, a high eCPM and a high Fill Rate. For obvious reasons, free apps generate more downloads. Reports have shown that almost 80% of all paid android apps have less than 100 downloads compared to fewer than 20% of free apps. Understanding the composition of the market your app will be in is also important. The Android Market based on the open source theory, can acclimatize a free app, whereas Apple has created an ecosystem based upon a philosophy friendly to paid apps.

Screen real estate for your ads is another point of consideration. Does your app provide adequate space for an ad? Android users are accustomed to ads, however making overly obtrusive ads can result in uninstalls and less time spent enjoying your game. With enough downloads, a great marketing plan, and sheer determination, you may even be able to have your app sponsored. A sponsorship would benefit a company looking for a cluster of the market to advertise their product to, while allowing you to reap the benefits through revenue. This would be compared to Google and their business model.

If you are still apprehensive about making a free version of your app, why not do both?

Make a free version minus some of the features of the paid version, and focus your marketing towards the free app assuming there will be some spillover to the paid version.

Word Crank is currently making more money with the free version than the paid.

iOS App Submission == "Headache"

So for the past two days I have been attempting to upload our Word Crank Application for iOS to the iTunes Store.  I have been completely unsuccessful.  I constantly receive this error message, "Error communicating with iTunes Store." Now, why is there an error? I have no idea and apparently neither does anyone else.



I have read several, and I mean several blog posts and everyone says something different.  My favorite post is "I just used another machine, and it worked."  Thanks a lot!  I just need to buy another computer and then magically it will work, GREAT!

I have sent an email to Apple to try and get some answers on this issue.  Until then I guess I have to wait, unless anyone out there has any other ideas:-(

Adding Pause/Play Buttons to your iPhone Game using Cocos2d

In developing the iPhone version of Word Crank it took me a while to figure out how to add the pause/play buttons using Cocos2d.  One post that I found suggested using the CCMenuItemToggle class of Cocos2d.  That is exactly what I used and after some playing around with the code I finally was able to get the the pause/play buttons to function properly.

I'm sharing the code below to assist others from going through the endless search that I made.

Source Code

[sourcecode language="objc"]
CCSprite *pauseButton = [CCSprite spriteWithSpriteFrameName:@"pause_button.png"];
CCSprite *pauseButton2 = [CCSprite spriteWithSpriteFrameName:@"pause_button.png"];

CCSprite *playButton = [CCSprite spriteWithSpriteFrameName:@"play_button.png"];
CCSprite *playButton2 = [CCSprite spriteWithSpriteFrameName:@"play_button.png"];

pauseBtn = [[CCMenuItemImage itemFromNormalSprite:pauseButton
selectedSprite:pauseButton2
target:nil
selector:nil] retain];

playBtn = [[CCMenuItemImage itemFromNormalSprite:playButton
selectedSprite:playButton2
target:nil
selector:nil] retain];

CCMenuItemToggle *toggleItem = [CCMenuItemToggle itemWithTarget:self
selector:@selector(pausePlayButtonTapped:)
items:pauseBtn, playBtn, nil];

// Create a menu and add your menu items to it
CCMenu *pausePlayMenu = [CCMenu menuWithItems:toggleItem, nil];
pausePlayMenu.position = ccp(300, 56);
[self addChild:pausePlayMenu z:10];
[/sourcecode]

Source Code Notes

One thing to notice is that I had to create 2 Sprites for each of the pause and play buttons because Cocos2d doesn't let you add the same Sprite twice to create the MenuItem object.

Download Word Crank on Android for FREE!

How to Add an Android App Widget to Your Home Screen

So we recently released our first App Widget for Word Crank. Having this widget will enable you to have a "Word of the Day" featured on your home screen. This handy widget is powered by Dictionary.com.  We thought this would be a nice feature for all of you word game fanatics.

So on to how you can add the widget to your home screen (this assumes you already have Word Crank installed):

1. Click and hold an empty area of your home screen. A dialog will appear which will allow you to choose to add widgets to your home screen.


2. Once you click on 'Widgets', you will see a list of all of the possible widgets that you install.


3. Scroll down until you see 'Word Crank', then choose it.


4. Some home screens allow you to configure it to a certain size; it is a 4 X 2 widget.


5. Enjoy!!!

Word Crank on iPhone

We continue to trudge along with iOS and cocos2d in order to bring you Word Crank on the iPhone.  The iPhone release should be out by the end of August.  We are very excited and look forward to feedback.

How to Rate an App on the Android Market

So several people have asked me how to rate an app on the Android Market.  So here is a very quick tutorial.

1. Go to the Market.


2. Use your 'Home' button to see the Context Menu.


3. On the Context Menu, click on 'My Apps'.


4. Choose the App you want to rate.


5. Click on portion of the screen that displays 'Rate and Review'.  A pop up will appear and you can then rate your app.

Hope this was informative!

First Week on the Android Market

So we have officially ended our first week of Word Crank, on the market and wanted to share some of our statistics to help benefit others.  Therefore, below you will find what the Android Market currently has for our stats:

As you can see we had 807 installs for the free version and 4 for the paid version.  We are very happy with these results.  We were hoping to hit 1000 downloads by the week end, and even though we didn't achieve that goal, we came pretty close!

Other statistics that we wanted to share are from Google Analytics, we track user engagement with our game and were very excited to see the amount of time that people spend playing Word Crank, almost 15 minutes per user.  See below for more details.



Finally the Android Platform enables you to track the source of your downloads, we used this feature once we decided that we would run a short AdMob campaign.  We ran the campaign for the last 3 days of the week.  Here is a graph that shows the amount of users who play the game that came directly via the market versus those who came through AdMob.



We hope this data proves helpful to others who are launching their first game on the Android Market.

Released YouTube Video for 'Word Crank'

Today we created and released a YouTube video for our first Android game, 'Word Crank'.  We had a lot of fun making it and hope that it leads to new users of our game.

Launched First Android App

Today we officially launched our first Android Application, 'Word Crank', check it out...it's FREE!!!!

[slideshow]

Decrease Size of Image Files

In order to reduce the size of our game's apk file, we used an image optimization software called, ImageOptim, available here http://imageoptim.pornel.net/.   Here is the description of the product:

ImageOptim optimizes images — so they take up less disk space and load faster — by finding best compression parameters and by removing unnecessary comments and color profiles. It handles PNG, JPEG and GIF animations.

It was very simple to use and delivered on its promise.  We were able to reduce the size of the apk file by 2MB by using jpeg images for the backgrounds and running all of the other png files through this software.  Screen shot is shown below.

Converting an Integer to an Int Array

During game development one thing that you want to avoid as much as possible is allocating memory in your main game loop.  One item that typically changes often during game play is the user's score.  In order to avoid creating new objects to store the user's updated score value, you can store each digit of the new score in an array.  Then use a simple method to display the portion of your texture, or image graphic, that maps to each digit.  The method that I used to convert from an Integer to an int array is shown below.

public static void setScore(int[] score, int points) {
int temp = points;
int i = 0;
while (temp > 0) {
score[i] = temp % 10;
temp /= 10;
i++;
}
}